The dashboard glowed in front of him. His skin looked faintly yellow. I could feel the road without him.
“Are you sick, Nat?”
“Docs just say take it easy for a while. Maybe a month or two. You know. One doc says one thing, another doc something else. Regular geniuses, they are.”
I felt a stab of sympathetic anger. The last doctor I’d seen had paraded five med students my own age into the examining room without asking my permission, and had flashed his penlight while they took a look, one after the other, as though I were simply a jar of formaldehyde, a blind eye floating in the dark.
“What is it?” I said.
“Liver. Maybe. They don’t know.” He nodded towards the woods behind him. “But summer comes, I’ll be here. Back in my trailer. You’ll see more of me than you want.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
I realized I’d put my gloved hand on his door. He was my main connection to the outside world, and I was suddenly afraid to lose him. I felt the urge to put my hand on his shoulder, but it wouldn’t have been right. I just gave a tap on the door, like it was an extension of his body. But even that felt strange. “Take care of yourself,” I said.
“Don’t let me catch you up in that hospital.”
“You won’t.”
“Just keep eating. Keep going to town.”
I thought he’d meant he didn’t want me to come for visiting hours. “Promise,” I said.
“You need anything, you call my wife.”
“I will.”
“Anything.”
He gave me a last, emphatic look, and the truck rolled forward, his window still down. He seemed to be towing dusk behind him, the darkness clustering around his red taillights.
The woods went terribly quiet, the trees along the road in silhouette, tall black spires that could have been made of stone. Early evening had settled over the field like a bruise. I could still feel the pull of the horizon beyond the trees, but it shamed me now. Nat must have thought of himself as my protector, as a kind of guardian for the kid in the woods, and it hurt to realize how much he cared about me, maybe because I’d stopped thinking I meant much to anyone. And it hurt to feel how much I cared about him. I barely knew him.
His truck faded out of sight, and with the evening chill slipping through my beard, I thought of what it would mean to lose the people I did know. A few years earlier, after my grandfather’s funeral, Mom had told me something Poppa had said to her when his own father had died. He’d been knotting his tie in his bedroom before the funeral, and he hadn’t heard her at the door. He was soft-spoken, my Poppa, a man with a natural kindness that generally sheltered him and everyone he loved. But there was something different, something bereft in his eyes. When Mom sat down next to him on the bed, he said, “Now I know what forever means.” Mom had teared up telling me the story, growing uncharacteristically quiet afterwards. We were driving from Newburgh back to Boston, and her attention didn’t flick to something on the side of the road, or fall through a side door into some other story. The trees alongside the highway kept streaming by. There was only that fathomless void of what her father had felt losing his father, and of what she had felt losing hers. She apologized for crying. There was a tremendous loneliness in her, so beyond her daily concerns, which I’d never imagined she had. An otherness from everything else in the world. It wasn’t that I’d still thought of her as an extension of me, the way so many children think of their mothers, but I’d assumed she still thought of me as an extension of her. Most of the time, for better or for worse, that’s how she acted. But there was this other part. A part of her, because her father was waiting there, already tending towards the beyond. And I suppose it was the first time I knew, really knew, my mother would die. Her father had passed on that forever to her, and some day she would pass on that forever to me. She wouldn’t be there to answer a call from the hospital, or be there for me not to call from the woods. That’s what death was—no matter the love that had preceded it, there would be no answer, no possibility of an answer, forever.
As I continued walking between the tracks of Nat’s truck, the evening closing around me, I tried not to think of losing anyone in my family. I’d assumed the lives I’d left would stay the same: Mom and Dad and Matt would be just where I left them, their daily routines predictable almost to the half hour—the breakfast cereals, the commute, the evening news. But maybe it wouldn’t work that way. Terrible things happened. Illnesses, accidents. And I felt irresponsible in a new way—not just because of some expected me I was abandoning but because of them, because of my responsibility to them as their son and brother. I couldn’t bear the thought of Mom or Dad or Matt getting sick—especially while I was away, occupied with my own needs, so deeply unable to help. And I couldn’t bear the thought of what it would mean to them if I disappeared.
Nat turned around down by the meadow, his headlights swinging back towards me through the trees. I needed to be doing something, to be fighting for something, but I didn’t know for what. Or maybe I was fighting, but just too slowly.
As Nat passed, he didn’t slow down, just raised one finger from the steering wheel. He hadn’t lowered the plow.
There were footsteps coming down the corridor, a quick double knock, Milena peering in my room, clicking the door shut behind her, and then her hurrying across the tile floor to my mattress. She sat down beside me. She looked at me for what felt a very long time. “It is still you,” she said.
She ran a finger along my cheekbone, and when I kissed her, the book I’d been reading slipped to the floor. My hand was already deep in her hair, my other hand pulling her towards me.
“But I must take off my boots.”
She began to unlace them. Her shins were very white.
“You are smiling at me.”
“It doesn’t quite seem real.”
She put my hand on her thigh. “But I am very real, no?”
The room was taking shape around us. The pile of books on the nightstand, the bedside lamp, the mattress covered by a thin blue blanket. No colorful world maps on the wall like in Juan Ignacio’s room, just strips of paper with my own chicken-scratch handwriting taped above the desk, quotes stolen from Van Gogh, Chekhov, Silone—nearly all about love or art or both. So much of the room had been aspirational, something I didn’t know if I could actually live by. But this was the third night Milena had come, and with her sitting there on the mattress beside me, everything felt possible.
“Class was OK?” I said.
“But do not talk now.”
Clothes tangled at our feet, our bodies clear of buttons and denim and silk, clear of lace and cotton and clasps, nothing between us now, finally just hips and smoothness and heat, the bedside lamp knocked off the bedside table, and her voice very close in my ear, “But we do not make love.”
In the rush, language just tiny houses and roads seen from far above, I understood her as talking not about sex but about love itself, we do not make love, as though she were saying love was something you couldn’t make but could only find.
She’d said it every night, but now she said, “Please, do not listen to what I say,” and when we were still again, her head on my chest and the room still moving, she said, “But I do not sleep here every night.”
But every night she came. A few nights later, she sat facing away from me, unhooking her bra under the pajama top.
“Should I close my eyes?”
“Naya, but you must let me pretend it has only been a week.”
“A week.”
“Only a week since I come to you.”
“But it has only been a week.”
She draped her bra over her satchel, moved towards me. “This is why you must let me pretend.”
Neither one of us was so good at pretending. She began to bring me things. One night, she opened her satchel and fished out disks and a portable CD player. We started with La Bohème. We sat with the libretto in the candlelight, looking back and forth bet
ween the Italian, the German, and the English, then not looking at the words and only listening. A group of starving artists has no money and no heat in a garret in Paris; it’s a frigid Christmas Eve. There’s a knock at the door—the dreaded landlord. The friends go out; Rodolfo, the writer, stays behind to finish an article he’s writing; there’s a second knock, and just from his response, you can hear he’s going to fall in love. The knock is the same, the who is there? is the same, but the music lifts. It’s Mimi, who lives upstairs.
Milena clutched my arm as we listened. I’d always scoffed at opera by default—it was reserved for ironical scenes in movies when the guy crashes his car, ruins the girl’s new dress, bungles everything. You weren’t supposed to live with such grand passions. But with Milena warm beside me, with the Bologna evening breeze playing at the sheets, the music didn’t feel out-sized. When Rodolfo introduces himself to Mimi—Who am I? I’m a poet. And what do I do? I write. And how do I live? I live!— there’s no part of his life that isn’t fuel for what he’s singing. He’s singing with his whole life, his whole past, his whole heart—all of it there in the fullness of his voice, the strings lifting with him, the feeling so much bigger than anything appropriate for meeting your upstairs neighbor, and yet entirely appropriate for the feeling of falling in love. He’s giving himself to her fully, and in giving himself fully he becomes fully himself, in a way he hasn’t been with his friends or his work. My skin turned electric and tears came to my eyes, and Milena made no move to wipe them away. As the aria ended, I felt as though she had returned me to some unknown part of myself, to some interior country where everything I’d felt and longed for made sense. It was similar to what came over me when I read, but now the feeling was outside of me, too—it was vibrating off the walls, off the bed, and I wasn’t alone with it.
She began reading All the Pretty Horses on her own, sneaking it to school in her satchel among her books on European political history and global justice. At night, she’d update me on what she’d read, on where John Grady Cole and Lacy Rawlins were in their journey across Mexico, on the forbidden romance between John Grady and the Mexican girl Alejandra. I loved hearing her tell the story—the brightness in her eyes the same as when she’d told me about Narcissus and Goldmund—and I couldn’t help hoping when she talked about John Grady and Alejandra that in some way she was talking about us. Spring had come full force into the city, bringing fruit vendors, opening the window shutters on the apartment buildings. The Giardini Margherita were full of teenagers practicing love. And night after night, we returned to each other up in my room. I didn’t go to any more Hopkins parties. We ate out together rarely. We knew Juan Ignacio knew about us, but I didn’t talk about it with him. It was an alternative life from the lives around us, and from the lives we had come from, but it felt possible—a different way of living, one that was guided by what we felt for each other, and sanctioned by all the quotes hanging on my wall, the opera we were listening to, the books we were reading.
Some nights she asked me to read All the Pretty Horses to her. Some nights she read to me in German. Some nights we didn’t read or listen or talk at all. We simply got beneath the covers, the April breeze drifting through the window, the candle wavering on the tile floor.
I should have known better. I hadn’t counted on the dark, how quickly it would fall. I’d sat too long, drifting on the light fading on the mountains, not noticing the heavy clouds blowing in behind the ridge. And I needed to move now. Not to rush, not to risk turning an ankle by landing hard with my snowshoe on a fallen tree, but to pole and to step, to pole and to step, deliberately and without pause. It was early February; I’d learned to gauge the wind, the warnings of the clouds. I knew better than to ignore the center dropping out of the air, the wind unmooring itself from the land. I knew better than to forget I wasn’t the sky and the clouds and the snow, to forget I wasn’t the weather—and that it could hurt me.
I’d descended past the shelf of land, snowshoeing down the back way, not following the regular path to the meadow. It was my shortcut. During the fall, underbrush had cluttered the back trail, but the deep snow had effectively cleared it by burying everything. There was no more trail now, but I knew the house was basically to the southeast. I just had to keep stepping, to keep poling, to keep my mind calm, my body moving. I couldn’t tell if the gathering white-blue darkness came from the clouds, from the dusk coming on, or from both, but I’d reach the house more quickly this way—it was barely a mile.
A crow cried hoarsely, beat its giant wings overhead, angled itself hard against the wind. The forest was emptying. The wind thrashed in the tops of the trees. The snow swirled madly, like a school of white minnows having lost direction beneath the waves. They seemed to be swallowing my face, trying to rearrange my nose, my mouth—like the horizon I’d imagined walking towards had suddenly enveloped me. My heart raced below the booming, below the quiet between the gusts, the very marrow of the trees keening against the cold, the pulp contracting inside them. I trudged on, trying not to rush, testing for buried tree limbs with my poles. I realized I couldn’t picture myself in relation to the house anymore. There wasn’t a familiar landmark in sight—not a boulder, not a clearing. The woods had become general. Every direction looked the same.
If I kept moving in a wide arc to the right, at worst I’d come out above the house, somewhere by the open field. If it was full dark by then, I could find my way along the road. Even a mile of road would take no more than twenty minutes. The plan was there in my head before I could agree—like I wasn’t the leader, or even part of a group, but just a straggler following behind. The toes on my right foot had hardened into something like a club. I’d worn mismatched socks and could feel the cotton one inside my boot pooled around my ankle. I was usually a boy scout about layers, but the house had gone strangely quiet in the afternoon, a quiet I could hear, and I’d hurried outside, not wanting to bother changing socks when there was only so much light left in the day. Only so much light left in the day. Against the snow catching in my eyes, I tried to focus on the trees ahead, to work myself into a kind of rhythm. But I was pushing too fast—not just for my body but for my vision. I didn’t know how to adjust, to turn my seeing down, to compensate for the speed of the storm. The woods were going flat, into one thick wall of snow and wind. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being prey, of being flushed in some direction. And as I felt myself racing downwards, the words came into my head from behind me, as though from something I was trying to outrun: If a man falls in the forest and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?
It seemed a bad joke. Fragments of poems and songs sometimes swept into my head on my walks, lines I’d never consciously learned by heart. The woods are lovely dark and deep. But this visitation didn’t seem pleasant. Its timing was poor. The trees were losing definition, dimming into silhouette. The uneven ground hovered bluish white, like a frozen brook, pockmarked here and there by fallen branches. If a man falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?
The wind pitched the slender birches like ships at sea, the sustained gusts a strange uncentered kind of wave. Clearly, the wind was hearing nothing. My tracks disappeared behind me, and I was just a shallow breath, the uncomfortable gravity of a body—an alien speck of color hurrying through the wood. The snow, the wind, the trees—they would go on with or without me, no matter the thoughts ricocheting around my head, no matter the feeling or lack of it in my heart. It seemed I’d crossed into a realm where there was no sound, where no person was supposed to go, where no human could be heard. This wasn’t the dissolve into a lover, the dissolve that freed you from yourself to make you more yourself. It was nothingness. I could feel my own bones inside me, could see myself as a skeleton walking, could feel my own disappearance as a disappearance already forgotten.
The blue of the snow had thickened into gray. The gap in the trees had become consistent. At first, I thought I was imagining it, but I was suddenly on a trail, and i
t was widening. The old logging road. The lane to the house would become visible around a bend about a quarter mile ahead. I would get back to the house—my toes wouldn’t be frostbitten. My pace slowed; the wind raged. There was nothing to do but keep walking. The road was less dark than the dark around it, the opening a relief from the bullying crowd of the forest. As I neared the crossroads, I felt an unsettling urge to turn away from the house, towards town, to keep walking until I came to the lighted sign of the Gulf station, to the jingle of the bells on the door, to some clerk behind the counter whose hello or how are you would rattle around my chest like the first coin in a beggar’s cup, but I knew the walk would take far too long, and even to drive, if the car could make it out, would feel very strange. To ask someone to help you to exist, without being clear what you were asking for, seemed immoral somehow. Was there nothing else to give a person form?
Eventually, there was the open field, which I did not look at, and then my car, its trunk reassuringly solid under my glove. There was the top of the yard, the snow a dark gray lake, the house a drifting black boat hunched against the wind. There was no light in any of the windows, no light spilling onto the snow. The darkness hit me like a blow. I had imagined, without realizing it, a kind of homecoming. No one tending the fire, no one cooking dinner by the stove, but just a light in the window, the sense of returning to a home. But the house was cloaked in darkness, as though it had been absorbed by the woods, as though it had become part of the beyond as well.
There was nowhere else to go. I trudged down towards the garage. I needed to build up the fire, to make toast, to take a hot shower. To do anything small and particular. Anything human.
Milena wouldn’t look at me. Vanished socks were flushed out of hiding, dust flew in the midmorning sunlight. A strand of hair hung loose by her neck. She was at the mattress, kneeling down, stripping the soft, cream-colored sheets she’d brought a week earlier. She wore an old leather purse over her shoulder, her back and arms moved very fast. She’d already stuffed her striped green pajamas, which she kept under my pillow, into her satchel. The thin blanket fell onto the floor. She tossed it back with one hand, but most of the stained mattress was still exposed.
The Point of Vanishing Page 13